Press Releases

The following piece was published in the Times Record in July 2011.

Many people have recently seen signs saying that the commissary at the Topsham Annex of Naval Air Station Brunswick and the exchange on base are slated to close in September. I’ve heard from dozens of retirees and active-duty personnel who are worried about losing access to this important benefit. Despite those signs, though, our fight continues to keep these vital facilities in the Mid-coast.

Let me start by saying that Maine’s entire congressional delegation is united in keeping a commissary open. Not all states are as lucky as Maine to have a delegation that works so well together on important issues like this one. In both the House and Senate, we have sponsored legislation to keep the store open.

At the same time, we have pressured the Defense Department to reverse its decision to close it. (I knew we were being heard a couple of years ago when I was touring Bath Iron Works with some top Pentagon officials. When I brought up the commissary to one of them, she threw up her hands and said, “We know all about the commissary and you’ve all done a very good job making sure we all know about it!”)

Originally, the commissary was slated to close this March. Legislation we passed in the House and Senate delayed that closing to this fall, but that deadline is fast approaching.

In the House, I wrote legislation this year to extend the life of the commissary by creating a one-year pilot program for an “enhanced” commissary that would sell some additional products with the proceeds going to offset the cost of running the store. That legislation was passed in the House’s National Defense Authorization Act earlier this year. The Senate version of that bill doesn’t yet include the language that would create that pilot program for the commissary but we’re hopeful that it can be added as an amendment when the bill comes up later this summer.

If the pilot program passes Congress and is signed by the president, there might still be a gap between the commissary’s slated closing and a pilot program’s implementation. In that case, it wouldn’t make much sense to close the commissary, only to reopen it later and I intend to make that point to Defense Department officials if this proposal becomes law.

Meanwhile, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins requested that the General Accounting Office (GAO) review the proposed closing of the commissary and exchange. The resulting report was revealing. Among other things, the GAO found the Defense Department doesn’t have clear guidelines for deciding when or how to close a commissary. Our senators have written to the Defense Department urging them to halt the closing of our commissary until they develop those guidelines.

Even though the bulk of active duty personnel have left Brunswick Naval Air Station, 10,000 people a year still visit the commissary and they are doing more than 400 transactions a day. And it’s no wonder — the thousands of retirees and active-duty personnel in the area save an average of $4,000 per family annually when they buy their groceries there.

Access to a commissary isn’t some sort of fringe benefit that retirees and active-duty personnel only get if they’re lucky. Being able to buy groceries at a commissary is part of the compensation and retirement package that comes with serving in the Armed Forces and it isn’t something that the Defense Department should provide only when it’s easy or convenient.

As you can see, all of us in Maine’s congressional delegation are working to extend the life of the commissary and keep it from closing this fall — but that isn’t our ultimate goal. We think it’s a mistake for the Defense Department to close the facility at all. A significant active-duty population remains in the area and tens of thousands of retirees are within driving distance of the commissary.

I believe that by extending its life by a year or more we can finally get the Defense Department to believe what we’ve been saying all along: Keeping a commissary open makes economic sense.

It’s also the right thing to do.